When an officer from the National Investigations Bureau (NIB) arrived at the Metro Education and Training Centre (METRAC) on an official visit, there was commotion. The officers cowered for cover as their director dug deep into his repertoire of tricks to outwit the visitor investigating allegations of procurement fraud.
—
Kojo wiped his lips with the back of his left hand as he dug his right fingers into the tall heap of steaming banku and scooped a fistful, bathed it in the soup bowl, and passed it to his salivating tongue. Vroom, it went down his throat to his stomach like cargo on a slippery canvas.
He smacked his lips and nodded his head in approval. You, this woman—if I hadn’t married you, I don’t know what else I could have done, he thought, smiling nervously.
“As I was saying,” he continued, “the information from the Director-General got to us late, and we had no option but to do what we did to save the situation.”
A thin line of saliva dripped from the left corner of his mouth while a piece of fish flew into an open file in front of him. He pulled his left index finger from his nose, reached out and lifted the stubborn piece of flesh from the file, gave it a stern, scornful stare, and redirected it back to where it came from, then closed the file.
“Procurement scandals. Hm. These people. We’ll see about that,” he muttered to himself.
“Secretary, come and move these files away—they want to share my small lunch with me,” he barked, spitting some bones into his left palm and tossing them into the bowl of water he’d washed his hands in before eating.
All this while, his guest looked bemused and trapped as he choked under the smell of fish that had taken over the office.
“I’m sorry, Sir. I’ll be done in a moment,” he said to his guest as he licked a streak of soup that was dripping from his right wrist onto the cuff of his shirt.
“Yes, like I said earlier, sole-sourcing was the only option available to us, considering the limited time we had to work with. So this query you brought—I don’t know exactly how to respond to it. Do you get me? What’s your name again?”
“Mensah.”
“Aha, Mensah. Mensah from where?”
“Mensah from the Serious Fraud Office.”
“Did you understand what I said?”
“I’ll wait until you finish eating, Sir.”
“Really? Okay. I’m almost done. I was so hungry that if I didn’t eat this thing now, you might have a dead man on your hands.”
“I have scotch here, Sir. Vintage whisky. Seven years in the barrel. Gifted to me by a friend who returned from Scotland recently.” He pulled the bottle from the side drawer and placed it beside the glass sitting half an inch away from the ashtray. “Forty-two percent alcohol,” he read, tilting the bottle slightly. He filled the glass with his left hand, raised it to eye level, scanned the content briefly, muttered some words, then gulped it in one shot. He belched loudly and muttered, “Ah, now I’m back to life.”
“Come on, give it a try—you’d love it.” He pushed the glass and the scotch toward his guest with his free hand. Eyebrows rising, Mensah shifted to the edge of his seat.
“No, thanks,” Mensah said, smiling at the awkwardness. He seems too unfit for this office, too clumsy for a director. A dry moment of silence enveloped the room as both men stared blankly at each other.
“Well, let’s proceed then. I’m ready for you,” Kojo said, breaking the stillness.
What the hell? How can anyone possibly have any meaningful discussion with a man who has just taken whisky as his advocate? Mensah mused, almost letting his thoughts escape.
“I’m afraid, Sir, we may have to reschedule this meeting for another day.”
“I thought you said you were running a tight schedule. What has changed?”
“I’ll return tomorrow,” Mensah said through clenched teeth as he marched toward the door.
“Wait, let me get you something small for transport. Wait…”
*****
The fluorescent light above Dick’s office flickered intermittently, casting nervous shadows across the mahogany desk where corruption had been refined into an art form. Outside, Accra’s traffic hummed its familiar symphony of impatience, but inside the Metropolitan Training and Assessment Centre, a different kind of orchestration was taking place.
Third Hand’s message had arrived that morning, delivered through the usual chain of plausible deniability. After Mensah had left—that persistent pain in the ass who asked too many questions and took notes in a little black book—Dick summoned his usual conspirators: the accountant with sweaty palms and the training and procurement officer who had perfected the art of looking busy while doing nothing.
“Let’s silence him,” Dick announced, his voice carrying the casual authority of someone who had silenced many voices before. “Once we put some food in his mouth, he’ll shut up. No one talks with food in their mouth. Here, this thousand grand from Third Hand would do him a lot of good. Make sure you film him collecting it. That’s our insurance if he continues to open his mouth after receiving it.”
Dick shoved a quarter-sized brown envelope into Billy’s right hand. The weight of it—not just the money, but the implications—made Billy’s palm sweat immediately. He’d carried many envelopes like this one, but somehow each felt heavier than the last.
Billy shifted uncomfortably in his chair, the leather squeaking like a confession. “That guy won’t take it. He won’t. I know him. He’s such a pain in the back. You can’t trap him. He doesn’t even enjoy life. Think of something else. Get him reassigned, or something. Something else. Please.”
The accountant nodded vigorously, his head bobbing like a dashboard ornament. He’d seen investigators before—the ones who took the money and the ones who didn’t. The latter were infinitely more dangerous.
“Just try,” Dick insisted, leaning back in his chair with the confidence of a man who had never met a conscience he couldn’t buy. “He’ll take it. I trust he will. Two thousand dollars at this time of the year is big money. How much does he earn for his troubles monthly?”
Billy did the math in his head. Mensah—everyone had started calling him “Head” because he actually used his brain in this place—probably made three hundred dollars a month if he was lucky. Two thousand was more than half a year’s salary. It should be irresistible.
Should be.
But Billy had watched Head work. The man ate the same simple lunch every day, carried the same worn briefcase, wore the same three shirts in rotation. There was something almost monastic about his indifference to material things, something that made Billy’s stomach churn with a mixture of envy and terror.
Later that evening, Billy found Head at “The Hideout”—the same establishment where other negotiations had taken place, where politicians met viruses and where destiny was traded like currency. The irony wasn’t lost on him that corruption always seemed to flourish in places designed for hiding.
Head sat alone at a corner table, nursing a glass of coffee that had probably gone cold an hour ago. He looked up as Billy approached, his eyes holding that peculiar mixture of weariness and alertness that came from years of investigating places where the rot ran so deep it had become the foundation.
No time for elaborate pleasantries. Billy’s hands trembled slightly as he pulled out the brown envelope from his back pocket, looked left over his shoulder—a gesture so rehearsed it had become instinctive—and then dropped it by Head’s glass of coffee.
“Here’s something small from Third Hand for you,” he whispered, the words tasting like ash in his mouth.
Startled, Head scanned the intruder, then shifted his gaze back to the brown envelope. It sat there between them like a coiled snake, dangerous and impossible to ignore. Raising his eyebrows, with his mouth wide open and lips pursed in that particular expression of disgust reserved for things that smell worse than they look, he asked, “Who’s Third Hand, and what for?”
Billy swallowed hard. This was the moment of truth, the point where good intentions collided with institutional reality. “Oh, Third Hand is the General Manager of Metrac. He is Dick, my manager’s boss.”
“You mean Metrac—as in Metropolitan Training and Assessment Centre?”
Billy nodded thrice, each nod feeling like another step toward damnation.
“What’s Third Hand’s real name?”
Billy brushed his face with the back of his right hand, a nervous gesture that had developed over years of delivering envelopes he wished he could burn. “I don’t know. Everyone calls him ‘Third Hand.'”
The nickname made perfect sense, Head realized. In a system where the right hand washed the left hand, a third hand was necessary to hold the soap.
“I see. So, who sent you to me? Dick, the Metro Director of the Training and Assessment Centre, or Third Hand?”
Billy nodded in approval with a squint, though approval of what, he couldn’t say. The whole conversation felt like walking through quicksand—every step making the situation worse.
“How did you even know I’d be here?”
Billy’s response came out like a proverb his grandmother might have whispered: “Money knows everything.”
Head leaned back in his chair, studying Billy with the intensity of an entomologist examining a particularly interesting specimen. “How is the office? And how is he?”
The question hung in the air like incense, heavy with implications. Billy knew exactly what Head was asking. Not about the physical state of the office or Dick’s health, but about the ecosystem of corruption they had all become part of, the way it functioned, the way it fed on itself.
“He does all,” Billy said finally, the words carrying the weight of confession.
Head nodded slowly. He had suspected as much, but hearing it confirmed was different. “What do you mean, ‘he does all’?”
Billy looked around nervously, then leaned closer. The words came out in a rush, like water through a broken dam:
“He heads the organization that regulates examination and tests. He owns the company that produces test items for students.
She selects the company that cooks the food. She runs the company that got the cooking contract.
He heads the training organization. He owns the firm that recruits trainees.
She… She…” Billy’s voice trailed off. There were so many ‘she’s and ‘he’s in the web of corruption that keeping track had become impossible.
“He appoints the firm that audits the books. He manages the firm that gets the auditing job yearly.”
Head absorbed this information like a sponge, each revelation adding another piece to the puzzle he’d been assembling for months. The beauty of the system was its simplicity—why steal when you could legally award contracts to yourself? Why take bribes when you could structure the entire system so that the money flowed to you naturally?
“So, he sent you to come and bribe me?” Head asked, his voice carrying no judgment, just weary recognition of a pattern he’d seen countless times before.
“No. Not at all,” Billy said quickly, though they both knew the denial was more reflex than conviction.
Head picked up the envelope, weighing it in his hand. Two thousand dollars. Enough to fix his roof, buy his daughter proper school supplies, maybe even take his wife to a decent restaurant for the first time in years. He could feel Billy’s eyes on him, hopeful and terrified in equal measure.
“Billy,” Head said finally, his voice gentle but firm, “do you know what happens when investigators take money?”
Billy shook his head, though he suspected he was about to find out.
“They stop being investigators and become accomplices. They become part of the system they were supposed to examine.” Head placed the envelope back on the table and pushed it toward Billy. “And once you’re part of the system, the system owns you.”
Billy’s face crumpled like a deflated balloon. “But Head, you don’t understand. If you don’t take this, they’ll make your life hell. They’ll transfer you. They’ll make up charges. They’ll destroy you.”
Head smiled sadly. “Billy, they’re already trying to destroy me. The only question is whether I’ll help them do it.”
“What should I tell Dick? What should I tell Third Hand?”
Head stood up, leaving his cold coffee untouched on the table. “Tell them the envelope failed. Tell them some things can’t be bought. Tell them…” He paused, looking out the window at the city lights beyond. “Tell them that somewhere in this country, there are still people who remember what integrity feels like.”
As Head walked away, Billy sat alone with the envelope, understanding for the first time why they called the investigator “Head”—not because of his position, but because he was perhaps the only person in the entire system who still used his.
Outside, the city continued its restless dance of ambition and compromise. But inside The Hideout, a small victory had been won—not over corruption, which would continue its ancient work, but over the assumption that everyone had a price.
Billy picked up the envelope and walked slowly to his car, wondering how he would explain to Dick that two thousand dollars wasn’t enough to buy a man’s soul.
Some things, it turned out, were still priceless.
Evesdropa: Hm!
—
In the corner where Head had been sitting, Evesdropa lingered, absorbing the residual energy of the confrontation. They had witnessed many such moments—the eternal dance between corruption and conscience, the small battles that determined the character of nations. This one had ended differently than most, and in that difference lay something like hope.
——
First drafted in 2020. Updated in July 2025